As we’ve seen with events like climate change and the continuing pandemic, people who are not scientists or medical doctors are also not at all shy about sharing scientific or medical opinions.
It’s true even when people are basing their opinions on little more than a bit of TV and newspaper coverage, a Twitter thread or two, and emoji-laden text messages with other non-scientists. But in an age in which science and technology are so deeply ingrained in our world, and the outcomes of research affect us all, there’s a clear need for informed and meaningful public engagement with science and scientists. Have we figured out how to do that?
Many science funders have been addressing the scientist-layperson disconnect. The John Templeton Foundation, for example, names public discourse about science in its core mission statement. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has long fielded a program in public understanding of science, technology and economics. The Rita Allen Foundation provides numerous grants for science communication, health-related topics and other areas. And many organizations award grants for science communication and outreach to diverse communities.
Now, the Kavli Foundation, one of philanthropy’s most committed funders of basic scientific research, has announced a new program that aims to bring non-scientists—a.k.a., “the public”—into discussion with scientists on the ethical implications and risks of research. The foundation recently launched the first two of its Kavli Centers for Ethics, Science and the Public, based at UC Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, in the U.K.
The centers will develop what Kavli is calling an “infrastructure” for early and intentional public engagement with the ethical considerations born from scientific discoveries. The centers will also examine how transformative research may also present dangers to society along with any intended benefits.
It’s important to note that these new Kavli centers are intended not just to help laypeople communicate or understand research after discoveries have been made, but to proactively engage with science professionals to guide research directions from the start. It’s part of what Kavli calls the ongoing “democratization” of science. That’s a laudable goal, but so far, progress toward constructive communication between people who essentially speak different languages has been elusive. According to the foundation, the scientific community has long wanted some mechanism to better engage the public and scientists in discussion about ethics and potential negative fallout of research, but that none of the efforts along these lines have really taken root. As a result, the public has been left out of the process. The folks at Kavli hope the new centers will build the institutional commitment to ensure that happens.
“At its heart, it’s meant to ensure that the public is involved in science earlier on,” said Brooke Smith, director of public engagement at Kavli. “What’s important for the foundation is that there’s infrastructure within science to engage the public.”
Kavli’s new science ethics centers join the signature programs that have made the foundation into one of the more important philanthropic supporters of selected fields of basic research: the $1 million Kavli Prize and the 20 Kavli Institutes it has endowed at top institutions around the world.
According to Kavli, the new center at UC Berkeley will seek to “reimagine” how scientists are trained, beginning in the fields of neuroscience, genetics and artificial intelligence. It’ll also involve some of the top researchers in those fields. The Kavli ethics center at the University of Cambridge will explore ethical questions in genomics, big data, health research and emerging technologies. It’ll operate as a collaboration between the university and Wellcome Connecting Science. Its leaders will include experts with backgrounds in social sciences, genetics, bioethics and journalism, and it will draw upon experts from various countries beyond the U.K., including China, Russia, India and Japan.
What’s not yet known is how the centers will achieve their goals. “The centers will need to try things out—there’s not a recipe yet,” Smith told me.
Still, the “democratization of science” has a nice ring to it, and in some areas, such as health and clinical research, efforts to boost public engagement in the research process are proving beneficial. The National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s main instrument for health research funding, has driven community engagement programs at health research institutions across the country to bring long-underserved populations into clinical studies. This has helped clinical health research move beyond a decades-long white male bias and embrace efforts to better understand and address physiological and cultural factors affecting a more diverse array of patients—factors that can have a big effect on medicine and medical care.
Obviously, the new centers at UC Berkeley and the University of Cambridge will bring a lot of smarts to bear on the challenge of scientist-layperson communication, but I’m glad I’m not the one in charge. I think the development of these public engagement programs is going to be a tall order: Scientists spend a long time learning to speak the specialized language of their field—languages like statistics—and the rest of us layfolk frequently misunderstand their meaning and nuance. Just look at how frequently the public and scientists yell past each other on topics like the COVID-19 pandemic and global climate change. And let’s also remember that these misunderstandings don’t always happen by accident—deliberate misinformation is a rampant problem online.
Still, this is one of those cases where philanthropic support can address a public challenge in ways that are not only interesting and potentially innovative, but also may never see the light of day without the application of philanthropic “risk capital.” As the new centers move toward a clearer picture of their strategy, we’ll see if they make any progress against significant headwinds.
